guest, dined, and spent the evening in social intercourse. Next morning, having performed the required work during the usual working-hours, he could, after breakfast, either prosecute his journey, or, if it had been so agreed, remain for a time on the same conditions.
Nor must it be supposed that this wandering life removed from the influences of home. However distant, the wanderer was able to hold daily converse with those at home,—was probably better informed in regard to the trifles of home-life than when there present. At a distance, such trifles may attain, and from a like cause, the factitious value sometimes accorded to a withered flower or a fragment of ribbon. In the presence of the one from whom they derive a reflected importance, they are disregarded: in absence they may become infinitely precions.
The tie between mother and son, in that period, was peculiarly tender. The father might, on occasion, give valuable advice on matters in which his extensive knowledge of men and things made him an authority. But it was to the mother alone were laid bare the inner workings of the heart. It was she that became the confidant of the first half-unconscious feelings of preference toward some fair playmate. It was she that advised, cautioned, aided as far as she might, in the first uncertain steps toward what is, after all, the controlling interest, the central event, in the drama of life. When what she so earnestly wished and labored for was accomplished,—when she saw her son betrothed,—she thenceforth, with the sublime self-abnegation of woman, kept herself in the background. She acknowledged the right of the future
